One of the things I get annoyed about is the fact that we have different types of charging cables for different types of smart devices. It seems that I’m not the only one annoyed by this, as the European Parliament just voted in favor of setting a standard for charging cables.

“Continuing fragmentation of the market for chargers for mobile phones and other small and medium-sized electronic devices translates into an increase in e-waste and consumer frustration,” the resolution said.

For the resolution to become a law, the European Commission would have to draft a law and vote on it in July. But the idea of adopting a charging cable standard has overwhelming support in Europe, as evidenced by the 582-40 vote. With some exceptions, chargers use either USB-C, micro-USB, or Apple’s Lightning Cable. The vast majority of the industry uses micro-USB and is slowly adopting USB-C.

Apple’s Lightning Cable will be most affected by this law, should it ever be made.

More details over at Vice.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: FelixMittermeier/ Pixabay)

Scientists have been studying an extremophile fungus growing at the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone for years. This fungus apparently grows toward radiation the way plants grow toward sunlight. It consumes the radiation and uses it for energy, like little power plants!

How can this fungus process radiation in this way? Because it has tons of very dark melanin pigment that absorbs radiation and processes it in a harmless way to produce energy. Scientists believe this mechanism could be used to make biomimicking substances that both block radiation from penetrating and turn it into a renewable energy source.

Chernobyl is a special case where extreme ambient radiation is a huge danger to anyone who enters, and having a “radiation blocker” to treat protective suits or even the entire inside of the plant to reduce ambient radiation could be a huge boon. Besides reducing danger, though, the world is filled with machinery and devices that safely use radiation, from medicine to manufacturing. Even low levels of contained radiation could be used to make energy that could reduce the energy burden of those devices.

Materials made of this fungus could also be useful to shield spacecraft from radiation. Read more about this discovery at Popular Mechanics. -Thanks, WTM!

Have you ever wondered how IKEA’s naming system goes? I sure didn’t know it works this way.

Apparently, Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of the aforementioned furniture company, struggles with dyslexia. When Kamprad found out that nouns helped him remember the products better compared to using code numbers, he created this unusual naming system that the company still uses up to this day.

A bookcase, for instance, is probably always going to be named after a profession, if it doesn’t have a boy’s name like Billy. Rugs tend to be named after cities in Denmark and Sweden, while outdoor furniture is named after islands in Scandinavia, like Kuggö, an outdoor umbrella named after an island about 125 miles west of Helsinki. Expedit, the beloved, discontinued shelving unit, means “salesclerk,” while its replacement, Kallax, is named after a town in northern Sweden. Curtains are named for mathematical terms.

Unfortunately, should the Swedish names sound like dirty words in another language, the product name will be changed in that country.

Not only do you buy furniture from IKEA, but you also get to know a bit of the Swedish language.

(Image Credit: IKEA International Group/ Wikimedia Commons)

It is said that practitioners of the Balinese martial art, called Yellow Bamboo, have the ability to blow their opponents away with their “chi” believed to be charged by a god. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work on non-believers of the martial art.

There’s also George Diliman, a master who claims that he can knock out and even knock down his opponents without touching them; a claim that his students very much believe.

Finally, there is Yanagi Ryuken, a Japanese man claiming to possess psychic abilities. Described as a master of Daito Ryu Aikido, he defeats his students with ease. But in 2006, then 65-year-old Ryuken was challenged by then 35-year-old journalist and mixed martial artist Iwakura Tsuyoshi. Ryuken was, unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, defeated.

Ryuken said he lost because his psychic abilities were temporarily weakened due to illness. It's impossible to know whether Ryuken's faith in his own psychic abilities was pummelled that day, but he reportedly continued to train students in his special style.

In any case, it's a brutal sight. It also highlights the darker, not-so-funny side of fake martial arts: people looking to defend themselves are being sold shoddy techniques that fail in real-world fights.

How are people convinced into fake martial arts? Super Eyepatch Wolf’s video titled “The Bizarre World of Martial Arts”, gives an answer to this question.

Well, what do you think?

(Video Credit: Super Eyepatch Wolf/ YouTube)

As humans, we do things that are, well, normal for us to do, like go outside to hang out with friends or work, put perfume, or wear clothes that change how we look. But for animals such as dogs, these actions can be seen as weird, confusing, or even threatening.

Take for example our love for hugs.

How humans use their forelimbs contrasts sharply with how dogs do. We may use them to carry large objects a dog would have to drag, but also to grasp each other and express affection.

Dogs grasp each other loosely when play-wrestling, and also when mating and fighting. Being pinned by another dog hinders a quick escape. How are puppies to know what a hug from a human means, when that behaviour from a dog might be threatening?

The Conversation lists 8 things that we do that make dogs confused. See them over at the site.

(Image Credit: birgl/ Pixabay)

Oftentimes, the young mind would think of illogical or nonsense things that make us adults annoyed. But sometimes the young mind can amaze even the old. Children can sometimes drop bits of life lessons that we either have forgotten or overlooked.

Check out 30 instances of these over at Bored Panda.

(Image Credit: Bored Panda)

In 1865, 17-year-old Mollie Fancher fell from a trolley in New York and was dragged behind by her scarf. She survived the accident, but spent the next 48 years in bed, until her death in 1916. Fancher became rather famous for the psychic abilities she developed in her invalid condition, and she reportedly gave up food and drink, saying she no longer needed it.  

Fancher slowly recovered from basically being declared dead by her physician, and claimed to experience a series of trances. She had lost her sight, but, placing her hands behind her, claimed to see through the back of her head. “I am sometimes conscious of what others are not,” she said, and explains how she stopped eating. “I rejected it. My doctor thought I was insane, but, as a matter of fact, I had never been more rational in my life.”

She claimed she could read, even without use of her eyes, and predict the future; she created beautiful tapestries despite the fact that her hands were paralysed. You can actually find one of her creations on display at a hotel in Lily Dale, New York’s “Village of Psychics”, a blossoming Spiritualist community during the time of Mollie Fancher’s notoriety.

Fancher was never put to a test about her fasting, nor about her psychic abilities. But she was only the most famous of the "fasting girls" of the Victorian era, and others who were put under medical supervision actually died of starvation. Were they frauds, victims of anorexia nervosa, or was it something else entirely? Read about Fancher and the other fasting girls at Messy Messy Chic.

Smart light bulbs are, well, light bulbs, but with added features. You can turn them on and off without needing to press a switch; you just need a mobile app or a digital home assistant. What’s more, you can also change the color of the light bulb to your liking.

It turns out, however, that these light bulbs can be used to hack the computer networks in our homes.

So if one of your smart light bulbs starts to malfunction, it may be a sign that it is being hacked, and a sign that your home network is under threat.

More details about this over at Fast Company.

(Video Credit: Check Point Software Technologies, Ltd./ YouTube)

In 1963, Helen Klaben and Ralph Flores crashed their plane into a mountain in Yukon territory. No one could find them in the snow-covered wilderness. They were lost for 49 days, but lived to tell the tale! -via Digg

Freddie and Truus Oversteegen and their mother Trijntje were communists who lived in Schoten, Netherlands, during World War II. The sisters had been raised to always help the underdog, which included sheltering refugees in their home.

When the leader of a Dutch resistance group took notice of their radical bent, he asked Trijntje if she would permit her daughters to join. Freddie was 14. Truus was 16. Without knowing explicitly what they were agreeing to, the three women all said yes. And soon, the teenage girls were doing more than handing out literature. They were luring Nazis into the woods and assassinating them.

Before long, Freddie and Truus supplemented their resistance orders by freelancing their Nazi-killing. They were joined by 22-year-old Hannie Schaft in 1943, making them the real-life civilian girl equivalent of Inglourious Basterds. Read about the exploits of this girl gang at Mental Floss. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Ministerie van Defensie)

Adorned with shades of gray, orange, blue, and white, the female kingfisher perches atop a driftwood filled with moss. Below her is a male kingfisher. With his wings half-open, he offers fish to her.

This realistic sculpture is called “The Mating Proposal”, made by a self-taught artist based on New Delhi, Niharika Rajput.

Over the past five years, the Indian wildlife artist has built around a hundred species.

When she was in college, she joined as an intern at People Tree, a craft boutique. There, she was able to sketch and build a lot of 3D stuff with various materials such as bamboo and rope, and many others.

“That is where I got introduced to building very basic models of birds with epoxy. But I wanted to experiment and make it more realistic. Later, in 2015, when I saw a flock of red-billed blue magpies take off from a pine tree in Himachal Pradesh, I started building birds. I experimented with different materials and landed on the process that I follow now.”

“The Mating Proposal”, which took three months to complete, has been Rajput’s most challenging and longest-running project.

More details about Rajput and her artworks over at Atlas Obscura.

(Image Credit: Kunal Rajput)

J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series is available in over 80 languages, including Latin and Gaelic. Two years ago, Yiddish enthusiasts, funded in part by a Swedish government program to promote minority languages, launched an effort to render the entire series into that endangered language.

It proved to be a great challenge because the translators had to find ways of rendering Rowling's word plays in ways that were both faithful to the authorial intent but also meaningful in Yiddish. Tablet magazine describes their efforts:

But Rowling didn’t just coin names, she coined many magical terms and concepts, and each of these required its own Yiddish rendering. Translating Quidditch, the fictional aerial sport played on broomsticks in which participants fire a ball through hoops to score points, posed its own challenge. “I could’ve just called it Quidditch [in Yiddish transliteration], but meh, we could do better than that,” Viswanath said. He cast about for something more authentically Yiddish. Inspiration struck when he “remembered that there’s this saying, ‘az got vil, sheest a bezem,’ which means, ‘if God wants, a broom shoots,’ and which possibly refers to somebody who’s impotent, or maybe to a gun.” And so, “shees-bezem”—or “shoot-broom”—was born. Along similar lines, rather than merely transliterate the name of the small flying “golden snitch,” whose capture ends a Quidditch match, Viswanath dubbed it the “goldene flaterl,” or “golden butterfly,” as butterflies are a common motif in Jewish and Yiddish folklore. By riffing off Yiddish sayings and symbols in this way, Viswanath hopes “people will feel the Yiddishe taam [taste].”

-via Instapundit | Photo: Warner Bros.

The Academy Awards Ceremony is this coming Sunday. To get us ready, Screen Junkies gives the mini-Honest Trailer treatment to all nine nominees for Best Picture, with a glimpse at the movie itself, the hype surrounding it, and a punny alternate title for each one. Then there's a look at the trends and similarities among them. Only one of these nine films will win the Oscar, but it won't make a bit of difference for anyone who wasn't involved in making those movies.  

Many stamp collectors love finding stamps from small, faraway nations to add to their collections. But there are only so many nations on earth. A serious philatelist might wrinkle their nose at a stamp from Molossia, Bumbunga, Tui-Tui, or Sealand, because these are micronations that have no real legitimacy. Molossia, for example, is a neighborhood in Dayton, Nevada. However, there are collectors who love these stamps for what they are.

Laura Steward, curator of public art at the University of Chicago, who organized an exhibition of stamps from micronations and other dubiously defined places, believes that these tiny squares are more than a toss-off: They’re art, proof of imagination, and rather sophisticated bids for public recognition. “A postage stamp is a small but mighty symbolic emissary from one particular nation to the rest of the world,” Steward writes in text accompanying the exhibit. “A functioning postal service, made visible in stamps, is an unmistakable expression of national legitimacy…. As a result, the postage stamp is an excellent vehicle for spurious, tenuous, or completely fictitious states to declare their existence.”

Steward even has stamps from Celestia, which is outer space. Read the story of those stamps and others in an interview with Steward at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Laura Steward)

Multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games have had their roots in the late 90s and the early 2000s. One of the games that heavily influenced the development and the definition of the MOBA game genre is the Defense of the Ancients, which is more commonly known as DotA. It wasn’t a stand-alone game in its first incarnation, however, but rather a mod of the real-time strategy game Warcraft 3, which was developed by Blizzard Entertainment.

Dota was indirectly birthed by Blizzard, which is why they weren’t too happy when rival PC juggernaut Valve put out a game called Dota 2 to massive ongoing success.

In order to prevent the DotA history from repeating itself, Blizzard decided to add new policies alongside the release of the remastered version of Warcraft 3, called Warcraft 3: Reforged.

Users can’t use copyrighted third-party content, so no more bootleg Dragon Ball Z games. Blizzard can delete any custom game for any reason. And all custom games created in Warcraft 3: Reforged automatically become Blizzard copyrights, a policy that would have drastically altered the history of Dota had it been around during the company’s pre-Activision days.

Fans of the game are understandably not too happy about these new policies.

What are your thoughts about Blizzard’s move?

(Video Credit: IGN/ YouTube)